Three Dell/EMC CX3-40f arrays were used as the storage backing of the test. The storage system included 8GB cache, 2 enclosures and 15, 15K disks per array delivering 19 LUNs at about 300GB each. Intel’s Hyper-Threading and “Turbo Boost” were enabled for 8-thread, 3.33GHz core clocking as was VT; however embedded SATA and USB were disabled as is common practice.

At about $1,445/tile ($241/VM) the new “second dog” delivers its best at a 20% price premium over Lenovo’s “top dog” – although the non-standard OS drive configuration makes-up a half of the difference, with Dell’s mandatory support package making-up the remainder. Using a simple RAID1 SAS and eliminating the support package would have droped the cost to $20,421 – a dead heat with Lenovo at $182/VM.

Direct pricing shows Istanbul’s numbers at $1,336/tile ($223/VM) which is a 7.5% savings per-VM over the Dell R710. Going to the street – for memory only – changes the Istanbul picture to $970/tile ($162/VM) representing a 33% savings over the R710.

SOLORI’s Take: Istanbul continues to offer a 20-30% CAPEX value proposition against Nehalem in the virtualization use case – even without IOMMU and higher memory bandwidth promised in upcoming Magny-Cours. With the HE parts running around $500 per processor, the OPEX benefits are there for Istanbul too. It is difficult to understand why HP wants to charge $900/DIMM for 8GB PC-5300 sticks when they are available on the street for 50% less – that’s a 100% markup. Looking at what HP charges for 8GB DDR3/1066 – $1,700/DIM – they are at least consistent. HP’s memory pricing practice makes one thing clear – customers are not buying large memory configurations from their system vendors…

On the contrary, Dell appears to be happy to offer decent prices on 8GB DDR3/1066 with their R710 at approximately $837/DIMM – almost par with street prices. Looking to see if this parity held up with Dell’s AMD offerings, we examined the prices offered with Dell’s R805: while – at $680/DIMM – Dell’s prices were significantly better than HP’s, they still exceeded the market by 50%. Still, we were able to configure a Dell R805 with AMD 2435’s for much less than the equivalent HP system:

This offering from Dell should be able to deliver equivalent performance with HP’s DL385 G6 and likewise savings/VM compared to the Nehalem-based R710. Even at the $12,702 price as delivered from Dell, the R805 represents a potential $192/VM price point – about $50/VM (25%) savings over the R710.

Compared to the competing Nehalem SKU’s, the Istanbul is fetching a premium price. This is likely due to the what AMD perceives to be the broader market that Istanbul is capable of serving (and its relative newness relative to demand, et al). Of course, there are no Xeon Nehalem-EX SKU’s in supply to compare against Istanbul in the 4P and 8P segments, but in 2P, it appears Istanbul is running 6% higher at the top bin SKU and 27% higher at the lower bin SKU – with the exception of the 60W TDP part, upon which Intel demands a 13% premium over the 2.2GHz Istanbul part.

In a virtualization system, this memory configuration would jump from an unusable 8GB to at least 48GB, increasing average power consumption by another 45-55W and dropping the performance-per-watt ratio by about 25%. Looking at the relative performance-per-watt of the Nehalem-EP as compared to the Istanbul in TechReport’s findings earlier this month, one could extrapolate that the virtualization performance-per-watt for Istanbul is very competitive – even with the lower-power Xeon – in large memory configurations. We’ll have to wait for similar SPECpower_ssj2008 in 4P configurations to know for sure.

System Memory Pricing (Street)

System memory represents 15-20% of system pricing – more in very large memory foot prints. We’ve indicated that Istanbul’s time-to-market strategy shows a clear advantage (CAPEX) in memory pricing alone – more than compensating for the slight premium in CPU pricing.

These parts show a 28%, 40% and 62% premium price for DDR3 components versus DDR2 which indicates Istanbul’s savings window is still wide-open. Since DDR3 prices are not expected to fall until Q3 at the earliest, this cost differential is expected to influence “private cloud” virtualization systems more strongly. However, with the 0.3V lower voltage requirement on the DDR3 modules, Nehalem-EP actually has a slight adavantage from a operational power perspective in dual-channel configurations. When using tripple-channel for the same memory footprint, Nehalem-EP’s memory consumes about 58% more power (4x8GB vs. 9x4GB).

VMware has posted the VMmark score for the first Istanbul-based system and it’s from HP: the ProLiant DL385 G6. While it’s not at the top of the VMmark chart at 15.54@11 tiles (technically it is at the top of the 12-core benchmark list), it still shows a compelling price-performance picture.

Comparing Istanbul’s VMmark Scores

For comparison’s sake, we’ve chosen the HP DL385 G5 and HP DL380 G6 as they were configured for their VMmark tests. In the case of the ProLiant DL380 G6, we could only configure the X5560 and not the X5570 as tested so the price is actually LOWER on the DL380 G6 than the “as tested” configuration. Likewise, we chose the PC-6400 (DDR2/667, 8x8GB) memory for the DL 385 G5 versus the more expensive PC-5300 (533) memory as configured in 2008.

As configured for pricing, each system comes with processor, memory, 2-SATA drives and VMware Infrastructure Standard for 2-processors. Note that in testing, additional NIC’s, HBA, and storage are configured and such additions are not included herein. We have omitted these additional equipment features as they would be common to a deployment set and have no real influence on relative pricing.

June 1, 2009 – Today, AMD is announcing the general availability of its new single-die, 6-core Opteron processor code named “Istanbul.” We have weighed-in on the promised benefits of Istanbul based on pre-release material that was not under non-disclosure protections. Now, we’re able to disclose the rest of the story.

First, we got a chance to talk to Mike Goddard, AMD Server Products CTO, to discuss Istanbul and how G34/C32 platforms are shaping-up. According to Goddard,”things went really well with Istanbul; it’s no big secret that the silicon we’re using in Istanbul is the same silicon we’re using in Magny-Cours.” Needless to say, there are many more forward-thinking capabilities in Istanbul than can be supported in Socket-F’s legacy chipsets.

“We had always been planning a refresh to Socket-F with 5690,” says Goddard, “but Istanbul got pulled-in beyond our ability to pull-in the chipset.” Consequently, while there could be Socket-F platforms based on the next-generation 5690/5100 chipset, Goddard suggests that “most OEM’s will realign their platform development around [G34/C32, Q1/2010].”

In common parlance, Istanbul is a “genie in a bottle,” and we won’t see its true potential until it resurfaces in its Magny-Cours/G34 configuration. However, at few of these next-generation tweaks will trickle-down to Socket-F systems:

AMD PowerCap Manager (via BIOS extensions)

Enhanced AMD PowerNow! Technology

AMD CoolCore Technology extended to L3 cache

HT Assist (aka probe filter) for increase memory bandwidth

HT 3.0 with increase to 4.8GT/sec and IMC improvements

5 new part SKUs

Better 2P Performance Parity with Nehalem-EP

That’s in addition to 50% more cores in the same power envelope: not an insignificant improvement. In side-by-side comparisons to “Shanghai” quad-core at the same clock frequency, Istanbul delivers 2W lower idle power and 34% better SPECpower ssj_2008 (1,297 overall) results using identical systems with just a processor swap. In fact, the only time Istanbul exceeded Shanghai’s average power envelope was at 80% actual load and beyond – remaining within 5% of the Shanghai even at 100% load. Read the rest of this entry ?

In Medio Stat Veritas

SOLORI's Take and Quick Take posts express my personal opinion unless explicitly attributed to other sources. Where possible, supporting facts are presented to properly frame and ground these opinions, however they are presented "AS-IS" without regard to warranty or promise: expressed or implied.

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